


under all the fire (i'm doomed)

by emollience



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/F, Fight Simulations, Pining, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 07:35:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18139283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emollience/pseuds/emollience
Summary: adora and the art of war.





	under all the fire (i'm doomed)

“I want to love something. / I want to love something without having to apologize for it. Please don’t tell.”

—  **Hala Alyan,**  from “I’m Not Speaking First,”  _The Twenty-Ninth Year_

 

 

She returns to the Crystal Castle, months later. She stands at the entrance with the sword sheathed and strapped to her back. She keeps her stare forward, determined. _I DIDN’T WANT YOU TO COME BACK, ADORA._ She counts her breaths. In. Hold for four seconds. Out. Nausea and fear pull too tight. She walks through a hall of blues, pinks, and violets. _I WONDER WHAT I COULD’VE BEEN IF I HAD GOTTEN RID OF YOU SOONER_. The castle is ever shifting and different. When she reaches towards a wall, it flickers from pink to red to white and back. It’s meant for her, she reminds herself. _YOU NEVER PROTECTED ME._ The castle was made for her and the She-Ra’s of the past. Its walls, its rooms, every stone and inch of cement and bit of magic made with her in mind. She pushes her shoulders back and touches another wall. Before her, the hall shifts into a familiar room: endless blues and violets, crystals sprouting from the ground.

Light Hope glitches to life before Adora. “You’ve returned.”

 _I REALLY AM GOING TO MISS YOU._ Adora smiles. “I said I would.”

 

 

 

Adora stands in the midst of destruction, sword glowing. Smoke fills the air around her and she sees the Fright Zone with its toxic green smog and reddened sky. Fire dances along the buildings. One of them topples. Despite herself, she winces at the debris crashing to the ground, at the subsequent screams and crashing structures.

The Fright Zone was never beautiful, not like Bright Moon with its pastel homes and gleaming castle and glowing sunrises. The Fright Zone exists in vitriolic reds. It has always been blood in your mouth, on your hands. It has always been stepping onto the back of others on your climb up, even if she hadn’t recognized the limbs beneath her feet.

But this — this is wrong. Adora knows this.

Across the battlefield, the princesses fight against a squadron. Tanks are uprooted and overturned all over the battlefield, and Adora makes out Bow and Scorpia struggling far off in the distance. Glimmer fights soldiers in Horde armor. Her face is battered and bruised, one eye swollen shut, her forehead bleeding heavily. The other princesses — Adora sees their colors, sees the spark of their powers, but can’t discern their injuries from where she stands at center, somehow entirely untouched.

Her skin is unmarred, smooth. Her clothes dirt free. She feels — fine. Rested. Strong.

Wrong.

She raises her sword and speaks those magic words. When the blinding light fades away, she throws herself into the fight.

 

 

 

She fights. Everything blurs to fists, and blood, and knocks to the ground. This is familiar. This is her at her finest: born solider, the fight burning through her limbs. In her hands, the sword switches from sword to shield without thought. It never leaves her grip.

_(She remembers searching frantically through the darkened, shallow water for the shield, the panic building and rising higher and higher till she nearly choked; remembers nearly falling to her knees, only for her head to snap up when a familiar voice broke through it all with a simple, “Hey, Adora.”)_

It’s not until minutes — hours? — days? later that she stops. Her throat burns dry. Her vision doubles. She sways on her feet. No matter how many soldiers she cuts down, no matter how many tanks she pulls apart, they keep coming.

She stumbles away, knees buckling only when she reaches the far edges of the battle, and she realizes that the sky above flickers.

Her lips part and she breathes, “This isn’t real.”

She-Ra — not her, not Mara, but another, dressed in golden metallic armor, her hair as pitch black as her eyes — appears before her. She bends the knee, and settles a hand on Adora’s head.

“The flesh,” she says, “could go on and on without many things.” Adora flinches, eyes wide. She remembers Shadow Weaver, back when Adora was smaller, still young enough to hope for things like the warmth of her embrace, saying the same thing. She-Ra brushes errant strands of hair away from Adora’s face and smiles. “You must know when to stop.”

 

 

 

 

The She-Ra’s of the past left behind as much as they could: simulations tinged with advice, with ready made lessons. It takes time to recognize the small flickers that set them all aside from reality, but Adora finds them at the corners of the sky, or at the very edges of battle, or on the ground beneath her feet. The weeks slough past with training exercises meant to teach her more about her powers followed by the trudge back to Bright Moon with her hard mattress, the mini hissing waterfall, the bright pastels.

All the while, the skin of her back pulls too tight. The wounds healed. The phantom pains linger.

Another She-Ra, older, eyes crinkled at the edges, a smile brighter than anything Adora’s ever seen leans towards her and says, “You must learn to separate power from emotion.” Adora thinks of Catra, pupils blown black. Catra, mouth pink and teeth sharp and that laugh pealing. Skinned knees, hands clasped to raise each other up. Catra, smiling as she throws the sword over the cliff’s edge.

Adora touches her back. She closes her eyes. “I’m trying.”

 

 

 

A spot by the side of Catra’s head glitches, barely decipherable. The simulation is surprisingly lifelike, but Adora figures Light Hope draws from her own head.

“I knew you wouldn’t go through with it,” Catra says. Her hand grips Adora’s wrist, claws digging in hard. Drops of blood roll down from Adora’s wrist to Catra’s arm.

The sword-turned-spear comes down. It stabs the ground right by the side of Catra’s head. Adora pants above her, fingers clenching the hilt tight, her knuckles bleeding white.

“You remember when they taught us about pyrrhic victories?” she asks. She loosens her grip of Catra’s shirt just the slightest. “You copied Kyle’s paper on it.”

And even though she’s a hologram, not real in the slightest despite the uncanny smirk twisting at the corner of her mouth, she answers, “If I had to copy Kyle, you really think I remember?”

Adora nods. “You were always smarter than everyone thought. You were always — always better. Even better than I knew.” The skin of her back aches. She wonders what parts of Catra do too. If Adora has left her just as marked and angry. This simulation is inaccurate on that alone: Adora no longer knows Catra as well as she knows the scars on the back of her own hands, her own palms.

Catra frowns up at her. Her grip remains just as tight. Adora wonders if she’ll scar after this is over. “I don’t remember.”

Adora leans down and says, soft and low, “You could beat me; kill me. But would you really win?”

**Author's Note:**

> __  
>  [beneath you / a liar / and a bloom / beneath her / i lie there / and i bloom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sso59VK6vP8)   
> 


End file.
